A Little Stress Is Not All Bad

COMMENTARY - BUSINESS

April 5, 1993|By Dick Marlowe of The Sentinel Staff

A lot of attention is being paid to stress in the workplace these days, and the consensus seems to be that it would be a good idea to eliminate it.

I sometimes feel that way about it myself, but after discussing it with a couple of professionals and reflecting on it for a while, I am on the verge of agreeing with them. A little stress is not an altogether bad thing - and whether we like it or not, we might as well learn to deal with it.

No matter where we do our jobs, it is called the ''workplace,'' and that is why we get paid to do it. Even though some of us are fortunate enough to enjoy going to our workplaces, I have never heard it called the ''fun place.'' After all, if we had too much fun at work, nobody would pay us to do it. We would volunteer to go there - maybe even pay for the privilege.

I have never felt that there was too much stress attached to my job, but maybe I am one of the lucky ones. I get some criticism now and then, of course, but not enough to lose any sleep over or cause me to change professions and become a forest ranger - a job that has always seemed appealing to me.

Had I actually yielded to the pressures and made the switch after receiving a particularly nasty letter, I would probably have learned that being a forest ranger was even more stressful than being a writer.

I did have a job with a lot of stress once. It was in a peach-packing shed, and my job was to send the bushel baskets upstairs where the peaches were culled and packed. If I didn't keep the baskets coming, the whole system shut down and the foreman would look down through the elevator shaft and yell at me. That was stress. I was about 13 years old, but I felt that the 10 cents an hour I was paid was worth sticking it out.

Surveys indicate that the U.S. workplace is becoming increasingly stressful. A management newsletter recently sent out a bulletin that warned employers that eight of 10 workers are ''headed for collapse.''

It gets worse. Yet another survey by an insurance company reports that 40 percent of workers polled are experiencing so much anxiety, anger, fatigue and exhaustion that one in three is thinking about telling the boss to take the job and shove it.

My advice is to think again. If you want to know something about real stress, talk with a few unemployed men and women who have exited the workplace through no fault of their own and can't get back in. Show me an unemployed couple with two children, a $1,000 a month mortgage payment, two car payments and credit-card debt to the max, and I will show you stress.

A lot of the hullabaloo about stress in the workplace, I suspect, has been created by those who want to teach people how to ''cope'' with it. There is no doubt that there is stress in the workplace and that some jobs are more stressful than others. But jobs are probably no more stressful than they have ever been. That does not excuse the dirty tricks of employers, of course, who take advantage of the job situation by heaping unfair amounts of responsibilities on surviving workers without just compensation and appreciation. That practice has been around for a while as well.

Many things could improve in the workplace, but stress will probably always be a necessary ingredient of a job. Sherwood MacRae, a Central Florida employment consultant who has spent many years shooting down some of the myths of the workplace, puts it this way, ''The Earth was in the process of producing stress millions of years before man even thought of coining the term for his own detriment.

''Even in recent years, man himself has been proving that stress is, in fact, beneficial to all of us. Aerobic exercise is little more than controlled stress and is specifically designed to reduce the flab we all accumulate, everywhere we deny ourselves legitimate tensions in our daily regimens of life.'' Stress, contends MacRae is just one of those things we have to deal with in becoming ''the dynamic people we are all naturally equipped to become.'' If you are among those who would eliminate stress from the workplace, however, you can get in touch with the American Stress Institute or a stress psychologist. One suggestion offered for those who want to reduce stress is to ask the boss to get a computer to ''facilitate your work.''